I am in the proccess of attempting my first piece of digital illustration, having only discovered this field a few weeks ago. I'm new to the forums and may be undertaking a too ambitious project for starters but I was wondering if you could share your thoughts anyway. here goes....

How do you accurately represent colours in a night time scene? how have you done this in the past? do you just sort of de-saturate normal daytime colours, then add a dark blue tint?

maybe you could showcase some of your nightime landscapes here... with explanation.

Well, you have to consider how the colors are saturated, and where our perception of "night" comes from. The more light that hits a surface, the closer the object will be to its true color. So parts that are lit by a man made light, or even a bright moon, will have more color to them. Things that are illuminated less, by the night sky itself, will tend to be the ambient color(usually blueish for earth). You could also move whatever color it is a little towards the blue part of the color wheel to simulate the ambient color.

I don't know if you're going for a truly "accurate" representation of night, but it's become a convention in film to depict night as being very blue, and it's something people easily equate with night. So you can always go that route. Plus, if you then want to set up some nice yellow lights (from a fire, incandescent light, or whatever), you've got a pretty nice color scheme all ready to go.

Of course Waylon has a great point, and I don't detract from it... I'm actually going to simply add to it. Very often in comics, film (as he mentioned), and fine art, the presence of blue definitely asserts itself. If you look for it, it's very much there. I had an oil painting teacher that would use an astonishing amount of blues (Leon Parson), and the paintings were always so incredibly full of life! These were not even night-time scenes he was painting, but soft-lit... and it was magical to see the blues! He taught me to really see colors like ever present blues.

However... Yes, there is a great deal of saturation lost. Simply taking a /normally lit/ image, and digitally adding less contrast and more darkness (through your brightness/contrast tools), blues begin to appear, since darkness is inherently cool.

I just spent a few minutes outside (in the dark) and was noticing how there was no color at all, except what colors were at the mercy of a yard light, and two streetlights. The fences, trees, buildings, were all quite colorless, except where light was thrown. The yard light threw cool tones on everything, while the street lights were rather warm.

Forgive the lengthy reply... Hey... the message background is dark... here's an example of warm tones on dark/cool surroundings!

What sort of effect does the moonlight have on objects? Does it cast any particular colour of light? yellowish? Perhaps this would be most apparent in objects that are metallic or liquid where there should be a reflection? Maybe this is obvious though...

"Every material has a certain level of reflectivity. It then reflects to that level its surrounding environment."